Donald Trump Did Not Create the Anti-Media Fervor on the Right

Blame Gianforte on Gianforte. Blame the trollish anti-media reaction to it on a phenomenon much older than Trump's political career.

Predictably, the alleged criminal assault of Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs last night by Montana congressional candidate Greg Gianforte has turned into a pin-the-blame-on-Donald-Trump exercise. And not just from a journalistic class ever eager to seize any club with which to whack the 45th president—here's Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), admittedly a persistent thorn in Trump's side (the distaste is mutual), but still very much a Republican:

There is certainly much more connective tissue and surface similarity between Trump and Gianforte than Sarah Palin and Jared Loughner, though I suppose most any number is larger than zero. Trump did make several cavalier statements during the campaign about knocking the crap out of protesters, and his treatment of the media as an "enemy" has been continuous. But I'm against the Transitive Property of Incitement here for the same reason I always am—it robs violent aggressors of their own hard-won agency, and it gives statist politicians an excuse to tighten the expressive noose. It's possible/probable that I lack sufficient dot-connecting imagination, but until shown otherwise I'm going to stick with the wild theory that Greg Gianforte is an unusually rageaholic asshole.

Because our tribal stupidity and disingenuous blame-shifting comes in two main flavors in this country, let us not forget that an even more strained contextual explanation for the Montana bodyslam has been percolating, most notably by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.): "The left," Franks told MSNBC, "has precipitated this tense, confrontational, approach throughout the country in recent months." What this has to do with a political reporter asking a congressional candidate about a Congressional Budget Office score is beyond me. It's true that the recent Nazi-punching debates on the left have been disturbing, and it's also true that Gianforte wasn't exactly confronted last night by a card-carrying member of Antifa.

The Trump-made-this-possible theory may be an open-and-shut case for the likes of Don Lemon, but it suffers from a similar fatal flaw that a lot of the withering obituaries for Fox News impresario Roger Ailes did last week: It gave the guys at the top of the (hated) conservative pyramid far too much credit for inventing and then cynically profiting from a pathology, rather than for recognizing and catering to an underserved market segment. To put it plainer, neither Trump nor Ailes conjured up anti-media sentiment from scratch—they knew that their core audience was routinely ignored or disrespected by the gatekeepers of media and culture and politics, so they presented a conspicuous alternative, one that always gives prominence to an anti-media/elite critique.

So yes, Trump's anti-media lines were always some of the biggest applause generators at his campaign rallies, from the very beginning. But you know what? The same was true for Ted Cruz. And Ben Carson. Hell, even Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina were getting their biggest responses by going after the media at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference. As Jesse Walker pointed out yesterday, the anti-media element of the political culture war has been with us, very strongly, since at least Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. With newspapers from 1960-2000 busy with the work of consolidation, professionalization, and New York Timesification, the more tabloid, populist, and conservative values long associated with American newspapering and pamphleteering were consciously and ahistorically shoved aside (read Jack Shafer's great obit of Roger Ailes on this point), meaning that almost every new technological crack in the media edifice has been breached at first with a firehose of non-lefty content. When the journalistic class reacted to each new turn with abject horror, the cycle of mutual alienation and open antagonism continued anew.

Is it any accident that among the biggest skeptics of Ben Jacobs' plight last night were veterans of two of the longest-running conservative media watchdog organizations?

Let's ask why on Earth a House candidate in Montana should have to answer questions from a reporter for a BRITISH newspaper????

The intellectual cul de sac of the Bozellian approach is obvious to his media antagonists, but worth reiterating: By focusing obsessively on media bias, you end up creating your own flavors of the stuff. (And libertarians know too well how easily anti-media critics end up becoming pro-state apologists during Republican rule.) Less obvious to my friends in the press is that the critics they despise have a good goddamned point: The media is biased, often ridiculously so, and swimming all day long in a pool of anti-Trump hysteria is enough to drive even some of us Trump-averse types to the borders of anti-anti-land.

If standard-issue journalists and commentators were more interested in persuading those who don't necessarily agree with them, they'd stop trying to elevate each and every nothingburger Trump story to Defcon 1, and instead be content to follow along the investigative facts being competitively unearthed on a daily basis by the Washington Post, New York Times, and others. And if Fox News wants to reverse its alarming slide into third place, it should find a way to engage usefully with the Trump-generated bombshell of the day, rather than retreat behind media-bias lead stories and #MAGA hashtags.

But old habits die hard, not just in media organizations but among the consumers who take comfort from them. Of all the news items that we could be talking about this week (including, it must be said, acts of violence much more serious than Ben Jacbos getting his glasses broken), do you know what Fox has devoted well over a half-dozen segments to? Katy Perry reacting to the Manchester bombing with the hippy-dippy declaration that, "I think that the greatest thing that we can do is just unite and love on each other and like no barriers, no borders. Like, we all need to just coexist."

"That's pretty rich considering Katy Perry travels with well-armed team of killer security guards," snorted The Specialists' Eric Bolling. Michelle Malkin excoriated Perry's "Limousine gulf-stream liberal mindset" on Fox & Friends. Tucker Carlson and guests had an extended guffaw at the singer's expense. "[If] the country is not unified, and the rest of the left is sitting around listening to Katy Perry and swiveling their thumbs and afraid to say 'radical Islam,' it's not going to work," warned noted terrorism expert Jesse Waters of The Five. And former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie perhaps spoke for the whole network when he blurted out on America's Newsroom, "Go to hell, Katy Perry!"

Donald Trump could resign tomorrow and walk away from the limelight forever (I mean he won't, but humor me), and this cultural reflex to rebuke media and cultural elites would still be resonant with tens of millions of Americans. As would the media reflex to treat that whole world like some kind of Superfund site. This mutually reinforcing pathology may or may not have influenced the unhinged pugilism of a hair-trigger Montanan, but it—quite unlike politician-on-journalist violence—is likely to outlast tonight's special election.

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Nothing like jumping on that te old internet and letting random people know how much hate you have for other people ;). You’re going to have a stroke dude, and that’s no bueno. At least take a beta blocker.

It’s hilarious how upset and self-righteous the conservatives got over Richard Spencer getting punched and over the violent protests over Milo. But as soon as one of their own does the same thing, it’s all jokes and apologism. This incident is just another exhibit for the endless wall of evidence that the two sides are exactly the same and that all that matters is my tribe over yours. Fuck. both. sides. Especially fuck Tony.

The biggest flame I’ve gotten on Facebook recently was a statement that it was wrong of the professor to harass Richard Spencer at the gym. Yes, Spencer is an infected boil on the backside of America but the principle of “just leave people alone when they’re not bothering anyone” is more important. One day it’ll be one of ours forced to leave. Same here. “Don’t punch people who haven’t punched you first” is basic good sense.

What do you expect from the cucks at NRO? This reminds me most of the Michelle Fields hoax, complete with the tape of the alleged victim saying “He threw me down!”. NRO’s French was still beating that dead horse long after the video surfaced showing that it never happened.

When Jacobs asked Gianforte a question he was told to take it up with Gianforte’s flack. All the people who told you Gianforte attacked Jacobs because he didn’t like the question are lying.

Then something happened and Gianforte threw Jacobs to the floor. Maybe Jacobs poked Gianforte in the face with his mike after ignoring the instruction to buzz off. Or…? When we know what happened I’ll start considering who is to blame.

Did it ever occur to Matt Welch that the reporter, who walked in — unannounced — to a private room and began badgering Gianforte, deserved to get pushed around? The guy’s an idiot. Gianforte is an idiot. The reporters for Reason are idiots, and Gianforte’s opponent (Rob Quist) in the Montana Special Election is an idiot too. If one is looking for dignity and proper demeanor, one should not cover politics.

Police in Tennessee charged a woman with felony reckless endangerment on Thursday for allegedly trying to run Republican Congressman David Kustoff off the road after a town hall. … A popular parade in Portland, Oregon last month was cancelled after threats of violence against one of the groups participating ? a local Republican organization. … Pro-Trump speaker Milo Yiannopoulos had his speech at the University of California-Berkeley cancelled after rioters set the campus ablaze in order to keep him from speaking. … Political commentator Ann Coulter, who staunchly supported Trump during his presidential campaign, had her speech at UC Berkeley cancelled after the protest groups vowed a repeat performance of the Milo riots. … and many more incidents of violence.

You had your media on its 8-year anti-Obama hysteria kick. Just because they can’t tell a fact from their asshole and because they’re all inbreds with CB radios and child websites doesn’t make them not the media. FOX News is also not not the media.

Also Trump is every bit the corrupt incompetent disaster the evil media conspiracy says he is because you have fucking eyes and ears.

“Besides like all the weird stuff that goes around the Internet, which is, y’know, sometimes a great place but an absolute, y’know, underbelly mob-pit of horribleness, I think, like, the greatest thing we can do now is just unite as people”

When asked about a religious fanatic blowing up children she goes of about the horribleness on the internet.

Because, let’s face it, in her world that is about the only thing that can touch her fragile life.

I simply cannot understand why some people are getting upset at Katy Perry for expressing an opinion that is nothing more than naive. She is a Hollywood airhead expressing airhead naive thoughts. That is the kind of thing that gets laughed at, not to become the object of ire.

I watched the video that was linked, and people were laughing as they made their statements. The whole vein-popping-fury picture painted above, didn’t quite appear to capture the reality.

Otherwise, as to the facts, a celebrity called for “open borders”. Right wingers object to that (pretty much by definition). Ergo they objected. Not news, except perhaps for the fact that apparently this “Katy Perry” person is well known enough to get lots of cable news coverage for her statements.

20 people blown to bits. Because Brit elites didn’t tend to their borders. “I think that the greatest thing that we can do is just unite and love on each other and like no barriers, no borders. Like, we all need to just coexist.” Oh, yeah, why not giggle?

The bomber, Salman Abedi was born in Manchester in 1994. His parents moved there as refugees who opposed Gaddafi. This wasn’t a failure to tend borders, this was an intelligence failure to detect a radicalized citizen. Or are you suggesting that Britain should have been turning away all Muslims for the last half-century?

They open businesses, do work, pay taxes and contribute to a diverse culture, I would guess. Who knows? And what does this have to do with Gandydancer’s non sequitur? It’s one thing to argue that Muslim immigrants don’t improve the lives of other Brits. It’s another to claim that “tending Britain’s borders” would have stopped one of its own citizens from committing an act of terrorism.

“If standard-issue journalists and commentators were more interested in persuading those who don’t necessarily agree with them…”

Commentators, sure. But “Standard-issue Journalists” with a desire to persuade people who disagree with them is kinda why the whole media-hatred thing exists. In the 60s the media jumped in with left-wing activism and has been there (and hated by the right) ever since.

Look at the Gallup poll from a few months ago that Ken Shultz has linked to a bunch of times regarding attitudes towards the media. Almost two-thirds of the country absolutely despises the media today. And I’m sorry, but right wing conservatives don’t make up two-thirds of the country. Not even close.

Really think about that a moment and let it sink in. Almost two-thirds of the country despises the media today. And it’s probably not going to change any time soon, because most of the media is too narcissistic and self-delusional to ever do any serious self-reflection.

Blogger VoxDay (who did the book SJWs always lie) posted a blog post about the event and one commenter nicknamed JACIII posted the following then I quoted:“Had I known their “Punch a nazi” campaign would enable punching journalists I would have started “punch a nazi” years ago.

Trump has clearly set the tone for the GOP, which has now officially devolved into a reactionary party. Principled conservatives (fiscally, constitutionalists, etc) are seen as an obstruction. The media is seen as an obstruction. Libertarians are seen as an obstruction. Constitutional checks and balances are seen as an obstruction. Civil liberties are seen as an obstruction.

Two glaring elephants in the room:

1) History tells us that reactionary movements don’t sustain themselves, with the lack of guiding principles leaving them rudderless in calmer waters. They thrive during times of anger and hostility, albeit temporarily.

2) “Berniecrats” are giving far stronger showings in elections than “establishment” democrats. The 6 point GOP win in Montana is yet another obvious example. The fact that the polling showed that the GOP candidate was only a hair ahead of a Berniecrat in a state like Montana is absolutely significant.

These things should be alarming to any remotely principled GOP conservative. Progressives are outperforming in every one of these races.

” The fact that the polling showed that the GOP candidate was only a hair ahead of a Berniecrat in a state like Montana is absolutely significant.”

It’s only significant insofar as it indicates you understand little about Montana politics. But hey, keep telling yourself stuff like that. Won’t win you any elections, but if it helps you cope, then it’s all good.

Any state that supports beating up the press is very much behind supporting jack boot tactics to get it’s ways. This include those who support Trump no matter whether he colluded with Russians or he thinks it’s okay to shoot black kids in the back just because they ran.

Also, all of “the media” nonsense. It’s comical. Everyone is an expert now.

Of course “the media” vilifies Trump. There’s a market for doing so. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but CNN, Fox, etc are businesses that sell an audience to advertisers. That’s all. That’s why they exist, and they’re making tons of money doing it. They actually welcome political accusations, because it reinforces their base of consumers.

People seem to think CNN vs Fox is a political thing. It’s not. They both target different demographics of consumers. And the more, shall we say, “niched” media (conspiracy stuff, Natural News, etc), does the same thing and exists for the same reason, albeit more focused consumer targets to sell to smaller advertisers.

Matt, I find way too much moral equivalency in your post. Nearly every politician uses or abuses the media to their self-interest. Am I surprised that Montana voters selected someone for Congress who assaulted a journalist the day before the election? A little bit maybe, but this is kind of signature of the Trump phenomenon itself. The crazier you act against the ‘machine’, the more credibility you have amongst Trump’s most virulent supporters. I DON’T see this as a good thing. Can we have a smart, non-deranged person as our next great leader? If such individual values liberty, that’s almost gravy at this point.

He certainly poured gas on it though. His dictatorial statements about him being the only reliable source for facts points right back at authoritarian plans to subsume a democratic republic to become an authoritarian state.

I find the resentment among most Americans toward journalists kind of odd. Journalists don’t make a lot of money, most of them don’t become celebrities. Most of them are in no way “elite”. And unlike teachers or police officers they mostly don’t work for the state. Even NPR gets “only” 16% of its funding from the government. Too much, sure, but NPR still has to reflect market forces to stay alive. They tell the stories the way their donors and supporters want stories told. If you find the Washington Post or Guardian too liberal or Fox News too conservative then blame the people who happily consume their product and support their advertisers. People like Jacobs are just employees trying to make a living. If you think Gianforte made some kind of statement hitting Jacobs you probably also think it’s a good idea to assault airline employees when your flight is delayed or to scream at waiters when your soup is oversalted.